Why societies collapse: Jared Diamond

PM - Wednesday, 2 March , 2005 18:26:24

Reporter: Mark Colvin

MARK COLVIN: The Maya civilisation, the Norsemen of Greenland and the Easter Islanders all have one thing in common  they had successful societies which collapsed into ruin and oblivion.

The reason they crashed, according to the author Jared Diamond, is that they outgrew their environments, that their appetite outstripped what was available to feed it.

Professor Diamond's massive book Collapse already seems set fair to be one of the most influential non-fiction books of the year with its analysis of why societies get to the point of destruction without seemingly being able to stop it.

With fears of global warming, salination and other environmental disasters coming every week, many have seen it as a warning for the globe, but Professor Diamond described himself as a cautious optimist.

On the phone from Los Angeles, I asked him first whether societal collapses were like avalanches, a sudden shift bringing a catastrophic crash.

JARED DIAMOND: The difference is that with an avalanche there's no trouble until the avalanche comes down, whereas when societies decline, there is trouble, there's more and more trouble, until things finally get very bad.

For example, Rwanda. Rwanda, that African nation, blew up in 1994 in genocide, in which six million Rwandans killed one million Rwandans, but it wasn't that this happened overnight. Yes, there was an explosion. The President's plane was shot down. And then Hutu extremists started killing other people. But there had in fact been several smaller genocides in Rwanda over the previous 20 years, and there were obvious problems of more and more people and less and less land to farm, and much more stress.

So this really was not an avalanche in which everything was good until you got covered by snow.

MARK COLVIN: I was in Rwanda just after the massacres, and I remember talking to the UN general who was there at the time. He had predicted it. And he was very, very angry that he hadn't been listened to.

Is that something that always happens? Are there always Cassandras?

JARED DIAMOND: Well, there are always Cassandras, and the problem is of all those Cassandras out there, which are right and which are wrong?

But it's not only the case that there are always Cassandras. There are always super optimists who tell you that those Cassandras are all wrong and the world is going fine and we're getting richer and richer and happier and happier.

So somehow all of us have to make sense of the Cassandras and the super optimists.

MARK COLVIN: So you think that there were super optimists in Greenland, in Easter Island, in the Anasazi community?

JARED DIAMOND: I would expect so. It's in the past, so that I don't know for sure, but I can tell you that every society we know about today has its super optimists.

For example, the United States had a famous economist, a fellow called Julian Simon, who argued that environmental problems were negligible because  you Australians would especially enjoy this  he said because, after all, I am not worried about koalas in Madagascar  he thought that koalas lived in Madagascar  and if we run out of copper, we'll synthesise copper. Well, every beginning chemistry student knows that copper is an element, and by definition you can't synthesise elements.

MARK COLVIN: By writing this book, you may have made yourself into one of those Cassandras. Do you think that you have, and are the super optimists coming down on you?

JARED DIAMOND: I've actually been getting it from both sides. Which makes me think that I'm doing something right.

There are plenty of environmentalists who criticised me for being too optimistic. They'll say, 'Jared, look at all those reasons to be pessimistic. How can you retain any optimism?' But I'm also getting it from the other side, from people who say, 'Jared, you're exaggerating those environmental problems, and everything is just fine and we are getting richer and richer and never mind four billion people in the world who are poor or getting poorer.'

So, since I'm getting criticised by both sides, I think maybe that I'm somewhere correctly in the middle.

MARK COLVIN: Well let's look at Australia. You say you love Australia, you've been here a lot, and you devote quite a large chunk of your book to it.

What is your conclusion? Is Australia among the societies that are on the brink of catastrophe? Or is Australia capable of turning the corner?

JARED DIAMOND: Answer to the first one  no. Answer to the second one  yes.

Australia is clearly not on the brink of catastrophe. Australia, like all other first world countries, has significant problems, which, if they're neglected for a few decades are going to cause you big trouble, and they're already causing you trouble now that Australians talk about a lot.

I would say the thing that makes Australia distinctive, the reason why I wrote a whole chapter in my book on Australia, is that first of all it's a country that I really love, and I've been there frequently and I considered emigrating to Australia. But the other thing about Australia is that among first world countries, it's the one in the most fragile environment, with the most difficult problems, but it's also the one the first world country whose people are making the most determined and radical efforts to solve those problems.

And so I admire Australians. You've got a tough job, and you're taking your tough job more seriously than we Americans are.

MARK COLVIN: Where does that put us then? On the frontline of all this?

JARED DIAMOND: Yeah, in the frontline of the first world, you've got, you're leading the way, and either bad things will happen to you before they happen to European first world countries, or else you'll find the drastic solutions. You have the courage to find the drastic solutions before the United States finds that courage.

The metaphor that I would use, the French suggested to me, is that the world now is in the state of a horse race between the horses of destruction and the horses of successful change. And it's a horse race that's what's called an accelerating horse race, in which both horses are going faster and faster, because there are more and more people and more and more potent technology, but also more and more people concerned with environmental problems. And it's what's called an exponentially accelerating horse race, one going increasingly faster like an atomic bomb chain reaction. But it's one in which we don't know which horse will win the race. And you Australians, like the rest of us, will know within several decades who's likely to win the race.

MARK COLVIN: You've already come under some attack here. Asa Wahlquist, who's the Rural Writer with The Australian newspaper, says that you have used a number of out of date figures, and in particular she accuses you of taking in your statement that 80 per cent of Australia's agricultural profits are derived from less than 0.8 per cent of agricultural land. You've taken that from one particular year, and that was a very particular and not a very good year.

Are you convinced that you've taken a wide enough slice through Australian recent history?

JARED DIAMOND: Yes, I am convinced that I've taken a wide enough slice, because I've talked to an awful lot of Australians, Australian farmers and people in the Australian Government. As for Asa Wahlquist's complaint about my choosing a particular year, this was in regard to my saying that most of Australia's profits, agricultural profits, are derived from a small per cent of its farmland. Yes, there are years that are worse than that particular year, '96-'97, and there are years that are better than that particular year. But the writer, Asa Wahlquist, neglected the obvious factor that every Australian knows  that most of the area that Australia devotes to farmland and pastureland is not good for very much, and that most of the profits come from a small per cent of the land.

MARK COLVIN: The same article says, "So how seriously should we take Diamond when he suggests that to fulfil our greenhouse gas emission target we should eliminate our cattle. Who's going to tell him that Australia is set to meet its target, not by sacrificing our six billion dollar cattle industry, but because it has reduced land clearing?"

JARED DIAMOND: Well, Asa Wahlquist has a couple of basic things to learn. It's not I suggesting that Australia could fulfil its greenhouse gas emission target by eliminating cattle, but that's a suggestion made to me by economists within the Australian Government.

MARK COLVIN: Economists within the Australian Government have suggested to you that we should get rid of the cattle industry?

JARED DIAMOND: No, they haven't suggested that you should get rid of the cattle industry, they've suggested that perhaps the best way, or one of the most effective ways, to achieve your targets of greenhouse gas emission, which are a big problem for agriculture in your wheat belt, is to eliminate cattle on land that is marginal for cattle  lots of land is devoted to cattle, and really isn't much good for cattle, and would be better off being devoted to other things.

As far as land clearance is concerned, yes, many Australian states have done a wonderful job in reducing land clearance. Australia as a whole has not done enough, and Australians would be the first to say this, because Australia is the first world country that's still clearing more native vegetation than any other first world country. In fact, the only other countries in the world that now exceed you at land clearance are Brazil, Indonesia, Congo, and Bolivia, which are largely covered by forests, whereas Australia has only a small amount of residual forest.

MARK COLVIN: Jared Diamond, the author of the new book Collapse, and he'll be in Australia on a book tour in late May, early June. Details to be confirmed later.